A Couple Of Bits & Pieces That I Watched Over Christmas and New Year…

I’ll be honest, I did an awful lot of ‘re-watching’ over the holidays and it was just what this Graeme needed, a large dose of ‘comfort’ movies and TV shows. I wasn’t a lot of good for much else anyway but it was nice to have something on in the background while I did things like wrap presents and so on ;o) I did manage to watch some stuff that I hadn’t seen before though, and because my reading plans absolutely went down the drain over the weekend, this post (right here!) is where I’ll tell you about it.

Lets start with the obvious one… ;o)

‘Stranger Things’ (Season 5)

My eldest daughter and I have been working our way through the series, over the last few years, and while I wasn’t too bothered about watching ‘Stranger Things’ back in the day, watching it with my daughter has been brilliant fun. Now, we really need to finish watching ‘The Walking Dead’ :o)

Anyway, there was never any question that we wouldn’t finish it and…

I’m not going to go into it loads (the internet has done that already) but on the whole, I enjoyed Season 5 and the finale. Sure, the show could have taken a few more risks at the end but I think that if you build a show on 80’s nostalgia and people watch it for that, they can’t really complain if the finale is the most ‘80’s thing’ I’ve seen since the last days of 1989. It wasn’t brilliant but it was fun and that’s all I really want out of my Christmas telly.

‘The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim’ (2024)

Every Christmas Eve, I’ll come home, pour myself a large glass of Baileys and do all the wrapping that I should have done way before that point, all accompanied by a ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie. This time round, I decided to give ‘War of the Rohirrim’ a go, it had been in the queue for a long time and I really needed to do something about that.

I’m no scholar of Tolkien but I’ve read the books enough to know that Helm Hammerhand was an old King of Rohan and there was a tale to be told here. I just don’t know whether the tale was told by Tolkien himself or whether it’s one of those tales developed out of a fragment somewhere. Anyway…

I thought ‘War of the Rohirrim’ was a nice little nod to anyone who thinks that ladies are under-represented in the original text (which I think they are to be honest). Hera’s tale may well have been forgotten by Middle Earth (and by extension, Olwyn’s too) but it has been told and that’s a good thing. I’m not sure that the movie needed to crowbar another reference to the One Ring into the plot (unless there’s one person still out there who doesn’t know about it?) but the rest of it was good; no real surprises but engagingly told. The animation took a while to work for me but it was worth sticking with.

And that was it really, turns out that my brain was too tired to watch much new stuff and by the time I’d woken up a bit, well… Other stuff took over. That’s the way it goes though, there’ll be other new stuff to watch and I’ll be a little more awake for it ;o)